(Corrects to add “million” in headline)
BENGALURU (Reuters) -Bharti Airtel, India’s No.2 telecom operator by subscribers, has spent 68.57 billion rupees ($820.3 million) to acquire spectrum at a government auction in the world’s second-largest smartphone market, it said on Wednesday.
The company said it bought 97 megahertz (MHz) spectrum that was expiring this year and acquired additional spectrum to boost its mid-band holding in its key circles.
Bharti Airtel said it has the country’s largest mid-band pool, which is commonly used for 5G connectivity.
Market leader Reliance Industries’ Jio Infocomm and No.3 Vodafone Idea (VI) are yet to report their purchases.
A total of 10GHz in airwaves, ranging between 800 MHz and 26 gigahertz (GHz), were up for sale in this year’s auction, which has been delayed twice.
That spectrum is worth 962.38 billion rupees, but the government received bids worth just over 110 billion rupees, per local media reports, as the firms had acquired enough to meet most of their bandwidth requirements in the previous auction.
In that auction, 72GHz in airwaves was up for sale and attracted bids worth $19 billion for 5G spectrum, which was on auction for the first time ever. ($1 = 83.5964 Indian rupees)
(Reporting by Hritam Mukherjee and Kashish Tandon in Bengaluru; Editing by Mrigank Dhaniwala and Savio D’Souza)
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